North Star

by Richard S. Wheeler

  The hollow had lion scat in it, and not at all ancient, either. A mother had nursed her cubs here. Mary didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Women found safe places and made homes of them.

  She turned the ponies out on the grass. They were docile, and would graze deep into the night, unless a wolf or a lion prowled. She would forgo a fire this night, and instead settled in the back of the hollow, wrapped tightly in her blanket. She felt comfortable in this woman’s place.

  She had rarely seen a white woman. The men had pushed into these lands, gangs and pairs and columns of them, leaving their women behind. Even Skye had come alone, without a woman, long ago. Now it was men, not women, who were drawing an invisible line upon the breast of the earth, and making her people stay on one side of it. Would a woman do anything like that? Men were mysterious, and the cause of all change. She knew it was not her office to do those things, draw boundaries, make war, make the earth different. Her office was to gather food and feed the men, and to bring her boy to manhood.

  Maybe when she got to this place called St. Louis, she would see lots of white women, and not just the handful who westered with their men. She could talk to women. She could share knowledge. She knew the best ways to gather roots and seeds and cook them. She knew the best ways to make elk-skin clothing for Mister Skye. She made the best moccasins, better than Victoria’s moccasins, and they lasted longer too.

  She knew it would be easier for her to go to this faraway place because she was a woman. A Shoshone man might find trouble with every step. White people didn’t like Indian men and were suspicious of them, and thought they would steal or kill. So it was good to be a woman going to the place Skye called St. Louis.

  The night passed peacefully. She had dozed eventually, and had seen many night-visitors who had stopped at the hollow to see who was there. She sensed the mother lion had come and gone while she slept, and had left her alone.

  In the dawn she discerned her three ponies grazing peacefully. Patches of fog hid the world. She felt good, had enjoyed a bone-dry night, and now it was time to ghost through the mist, ever downhill to the river the white men called the North Platte.

  When she reached the Big Road days later she found it empty, and the reason was plain. It was so wet that wagons could not roll over it without miring. She saw awful ruts dug by iron wheels, and ox-prints deep in the muck, where weary animals had struggled to drag the gumbo-bound wagons. It was too early for the great migration of white people, and those who had tried it this time of year were undoubtedly regretting it.

  The muck was hard even on her ponies, but she was not bound to the road, and found easier passage off to the side, away from the mire. She was in no hurry, either, and let her ponies fatten on the tender grasses joyously reaching for the sun.

  When she did come across white men, they were usually with pack animals rather than wagons. They always looked her over with curiosity, but she never let on that she understood what they were saying. Sometimes their comments about savages or filthy squaws made her burn. Whenever they stopped to converse with her, she spoke only Shoshone and smiled quietly. It was good. One cheerful company of bearded prospectors even gave her a sack of flour as a gift, just because they felt like it.

  “Lifts the heart to see a right pretty lady,” one said.

  She nodded, and acknowledged the gift with a bright smile.

  By the time she reached Fort Laramie she had resolved not to stop there. Skye’s friend Colonel Bullock was no longer operating the store. She didn’t know a soul, and had no money or credit to buy anything. And she didn’t need anything anyway, but some bright ribbons would have given her joy.

  She was observed. All who passed the post were carefully observed and counted by the army. But she was a woman, after all, and what did it matter? So she walked her ponies past the flapping red, white, and blue flag, and the blue regimental flag, and the blue-bellies who were lounging on the shaded veranda of the store, and the others working at the stables or chopping firewood. There was scarcely an immigrant wagon parked there, but in this month of May, as they called it, who could travel? It was chilly, and she smelled the pine smoke from all the fort’s fires drifting through the narrows that contained the post.

  And then she was free, advancing eastward toward the great quiet prairies, where only the wind made a sound.

  twelve

  Many Quill Woman—she used her Absaroka name more and more these winters—woke alone after a light doze. Skye was not at the bend of the Yellowstone. She padded down to the water’s edge and washed her face and hands, feeling the icy water abrade her seamed flesh. There were young cattails rising from the mud of a slough nearby. Maybe she would make a breakfast of their starchy roots. But she didn’t feel hungry. She often forgot to eat, just like so many of the old ones in her village.

  She felt all right, except for the great weariness that comes to reside in one’s body after a long life. She was used to it. But she thought she could never get used to the loss of vision, the thin yellow skim that softened everything and made the bright clean world hazy. Someday soon the only light that would reach her would be milky and the world would be white and without form.

  She found her pony grazing peacefully, and bridled and saddled her. A simple hackamore and a light saddle built over a sawbuck frame sufficed. She had made a hundred of them over the years. A saddle provided a place to hang her feet and kept the pony’s backbone from sawing her in two. She rolled her few things in her blankets and tied the roll on the cantle. She would not bother with breakfast.

  She began a spiral circle, looking for anything she did not wish to see. Her eyes weren’t good, but she would not miss what she dreaded to see. She stopped at the ashes of a campfire, dismounted, and studied the area. She could not tell how old it was. She remounted, circled wider, probed adjoining gulches, and studied the land from ridges.

  He was not there. He had not died there, either, unless the relentless river had washed him away. She hunched into her saddle a moment, drawing her old coat tight against the probing May breeze, and then turned toward the mountains. Beyond them was white men’s land, and the place called Bozeman City.

  She ascended into winter, and the next day descended into spring, riding past Fort Ellis, built to protect white people from the wild Indians to the east. No one at that sprawling complex of log buildings noticed. She was a bony old squaw, and thus not important. She reached Bozeman City a while later, passing a wagon yard first, and then a barn, and finally a scatter of wooden buildings, some of sawn wood, some of log, some whitewashed, most of them weathering gray with the sun and rain.

  No adult noticed. Who cared about a lone squaw? But finally some children collected, trotting along beside her as she sat her pony. Boys, mostly, wild little things without the manners of any Absaroka child.

  “Hey, you speak English?” a blond boy yelled.

  “You’re goddamn right,” she replied.

  “Oh!”

  “Hey, how come you talk that way?” a freckled kid asked.

  “So white boys will shit their pants,” she said.

  “Boy, wait till I tell my pa about you!”

  “Where you going?” asked another, this one smaller.

  “I’m going to scalp everyone in town and burn it,” she replied.

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m a warrior woman, that’s why.”

  “You ever kill a white man?”

  “You bet your ass,” she said.

  That subdued them a little. They trailed a little behind, and finally out of arrow range, and she steered her pony along a mucky street lined with sagging mercantiles with false fronts, most of which looked ready to burn away at the slightest excuse. The tawdry little town darkened the golden expanses of the Three Forks country beyond, and she wished it would turn itself into dust.

  Now that she was in Bozeman City, she scarcely knew what to do, where to look, what to ask. She felt safe enough. Age and femaleness protected her.
If she had been a young Absaroka warrior riding proudly into town, things might be different. She felt an ancient helplessness she had known all her life when it came to dealing with white men.

  Was Skye here? The town wasn’t so big it could hide him. She chose a saloon. She could not read its name, but she knew somehow it was a drinking place. Maybe Skye would be inside.

  She slid off her pony, letting her old limbs adjust, and then drew her blanket around her. The blanket warded off the gazes of white men, so she pulled it tight, to make a barrier to their eyes. She opened the creaking door and confronted the rank odor and darkness of these places. This was lit by a small window and nothing else. A line of hairy and smelly men stood at a bar. They all stared at her. Skye was not among them.

  “Hey, squaw, you’re not allowed. You want a bottle, you come to the back door. And have cash. I ain’t bartering,” the barkeep growled. He wiped his hairy hands across his grubby apron.

  “Goddamn outhouses smell better than here,” she said, and walked out.

  There was no place for native people in this new world, she thought. Maybe Skye was right, sending the boy to be made into a white man. Maybe her people were dying out, never to return. Maybe she was the last generation of the Absaroka.

  She looked for his ponies. She tried a clapboard mercantile, where the suspicious clerk, wearing a black sleeve garter and chin whiskers, followed her every step through the dry goods, obviously determined to prevent imminent theft.

  “Shit on you,” she said pleasantly at the door, which jangled as she left.

  She probed a grocery, wandering past cracker barrels and pickle jars, again followed by a slit-eyed boy who carried a rolling pin as a defense against ancient redskins.

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  She peered into the window of a saddlery but did not see him. She entered another saloon, but the barkeep barreled down on her, pointed toward the door, and pushed her through it. She did not have time enough to see if Skye was there, but his horse wasn’t tied to the rail in front of the place. She circled around and checked the alley just in case he was lying in it.

  To hell with all white men, and maybe Skye too, she thought. White men with their bread-dough faces and wiry beards and greedy eyes.

  She peered into a restaurant, this one operated by a matronly woman wearing a black eye patch who frowned at her, and she did not see Skye there. Nothing but hairy white men eating away. She discovered a bank, one of those mysterious places she knew little about except that money issued from them and they took money away from others. She thought Skye might be in it, and discovered a great silence within, with two whiskered men locked into cages eyeing her. But no one said a word. They stared at her; she grinned at them.

  “Goddamn,” she said.

  “May we help you, madam?” yellow whiskers asked.

  “I want money. I think I’ll be a rich sonofabitch,” she said. “Build us a goddamn house.”

  “You will want to talk to our mortgage department,” orange whiskers said. “And he’s out foreclosing on a ranch.”

  She didn’t know what that was, but it sounded bad. But she liked this whiskers. He had orange hairy cheeks, but he cut off the hair at lip level. And he wore an orange bush between his lips and his nostrils. He probably didn’t like the way he looks, if he did that, she thought. Skye didn’t care one way or another, and had himself a big hairy beard. But this one shaved in patches, smooth here, hairy there. Maybe that said something about him. Damned if she would ever understand white men.

  “Hey, my man wants to build a big house. You got money for him?” she asked.

  “He could apply for a mortgage,” whiskers said. “He would need to have good credit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Assets. Something to protect our loan to him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, deeded land, a business, a mine, a herd of cattle, investments. Does the gentleman have these things?”

  “Hell no,” she said. “He’s got a lodge, two wives, a Sharps rifle, and bear medicine. He’s got a bear-claw necklace, biggest goddamn claws you ever saw. You want collateral? Bear medicine is it. No one got medicine like Skye.”

  He pursed his lips. “That would make it more troublesome. We need tangible assets.” He paused. “What does he do?”

  “He sits in the lodge all winter and makes love first one wife and then the other.”

  “Is he a big chief?”

  “Hell yes, biggest goddamn chief ever lived. I’m his older woman, and he’s got a younger one too. More wives you got, the richer you are. How about that?”

  “Ah, that wouldn’t be collateral,” whiskers said.

  “Young wife, Mary, she’s still pretty.”

  “Ah, madam, I’m afraid—”

  “Damned if I know what this collateral is, but when I find him I’ll drag him in here as soon as he’s sobered up and we’ll get you some. He’s off sucking a bottle somewhere. Then we’ll figure it out. Two wives, that’s good collateral, eh?”

  Whiskers smiled. “You make an interesting case,” he said.

  “Hey, goddamn, I’ll be back,” she said.

  She perused the rest of Bozeman City, saw no sign of him, checked the alleys behind the saloons, where he wasn’t, and finally realized the sonofabitch was somewhere else. On her way out of town, she passed the livery barn, saw his nag in the pen, got off her pony under the suspicious gaze of the owner, and approached.

  “Where are you hiding the sonofabitch?” she asked.

  The liveryman yawned and jerked a thumb toward a hay barn. “I got him where I want him,” he said. “He’s got no choice. He’s the worst audience I ever had. I’d like a little respect but I don’t get it from him.”

  She tromped into shadow, was struck with the sweet, pungent smell of hay, and found Skye lying on a spread-out canvas on a plateau of soft, prickly hay. She stared. His leg was bound up. Her man had a broken leg. Maybe he fell down in a saloon.

  “I thought you might find me,” he said.

  “Goddammit,” she said. “I leave you alone for a few days and you get into trouble.”

  He didn’t laugh. She looked into his face and saw gauntness and pain there. There was more. She saw a broken man, hemmed by age.

  “Now I listen,” she said. “Tell me. You get drunk or something?”

  “I got thrown by an ox,” he said.

  “You what?”

  “Thrown by an ox! Don’t you hear me?” he snapped.

  Wearily Skye told her what had happened at the bend of the Yellowstone, and how he was rescued by some teamsters looking for livestock, and how the very ox that had caught and thrown him with its horns was now at work dragging a freight wagon.

  “Still hurt some,” he said. “But I’m here, and they’re feeding me. I’ve got a roof over me and a bed.”

  “Oh, Skye,” she said, and knelt beside him, then clung to him.

  thirteen

  The man looming above Skye as he lay in the hay barn proved to be the town marshal, Magnus Cropper. Skye assumed as much, noting the man’s black frock coat and the steel circlet pinned to his lapel.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Cropper said. “Complaints is what I’m dealing with.”

  Behind him, Clyde Kangaroo hovered, bristling with curiosity.

  Skye felt Victoria tense beside him.

  “This old squaw, she’s not welcome in Bozeman City, scaring white boys half to death with her foul threats.”

  “They deserved some scaring,” she said.

  “Who are you?” the marshal asked.

  “Mister Skye.”

  “A drifter, I suppose. Squaw man, looks like.”

  Skye sat up and clamped his ancient top hat to his locks.

  “This is my wife, Victoria, of the Absaroka People,” he said. “And you, sir?”

  “Cropper, Skye. The law here.” He had the look of someone not expecting trouble.

  “I prefer to be addressed as mister
.”

  Cropper smiled. “Don’t matter how you want to be called. You’re leaving town. Vagrants and tramps and foul-mouthed squaws, they ain’t welcome. We’re a proper town.”

  “He’s a border man,” Kangaroo said. “Been here forty, fifty years. He come to this country long before there was any Bozeman City. He led them fur brigades.”

  “Am I supposed to be impressed, Kangaroo?”

  “He’s got him a real reputation. I know all about him. He don’t say nothing about himself, but I found it out. You ever heard of Jim Bridger? Well this one’s twice Jim Bridger.”

  Cropper ignored the liveryman. “Don’t matter,” he said. “This pair ain’t respectable white people, and that matters. And from the looks of them, they don’t have a plugged nickel, so they’re beggars, vagrants, and I’m shipping them out.”

  “I’ve a broken leg,” Skye said.

  “It matters not to me. Use a crutch.”

  “Goddamn savage,” Victoria said.

  “Public cussing, that’s a misdemeanor,” Cropper announced. “Taught some boys to foul their own mouths is what you did. I heard about it fast enough from a few folks. Here’s your choice. You git out right now on your own, or I’ll break your other knee.”

  “He didn’t do nothing,” Kangaroo said. “He’s paid up for two more weeks. I traded him a month of chow for a pony.”

  “Then I suppose you owe him two weeks of chow,” Cropper said.

  “Marshal, this here man, you ask the old-timers who he is.”

  “He ain’t welcome. We’re civilized now,” Cropper said.

  Skye nodded to Victoria. “I can ride,” he said. “My knee won’t like it, but I’ll deal with it.”

  Victoria stared bitterly at the marshal and headed for the pens where Skye’s buckskin horse stood quietly, as well as her own pony.

  “I tell you, Marshal, this here man is more than you think,” Kangaroo said.

  “What I think is that this hobo in greasy buckskins is on his way out of town.”